Excavations carried out by archaeologists at Bağlararası, a site in the Çeşme district of Turkey’s Izmir province, have uncovered remains and clear evidence of the devastating eruption of the Santorini volcano some 3,500 years ago, which completely devastated the Aegean coastline and led to the destruction of the Minoan civilisation.
Greece – and also Turkey – has been concerned in recent days about the wave of earthquakes that has been shaking the Aegean since January with its epicentre at the Kolumbo volcano, an underwater volcano located some 6.5 km northeast of Santorini (Thera, in Greek) and which has caused thousands of tremors in recent weeks, dozens of them with a magnitude over 4 or even 5 on the Richter scale, leading the government in Athens to declare a state of emergency in the face of a possible major earthquake or even what many scientists believe could be an imminent eruption of the magmatic chamber beneath Greece’s most touristy island, from where 2 out of 3 of its inhabitants have fled to mainland Greece.
At almost 4,000 years old, the archaeological site of Bağlararası – located today next to the Çeşme marina – is the oldest on the Çeşme peninsula and has allowed historians to shed light on what life was like in a Bronze Age port city on the west coast of Asia Minor. The excavations began in 2001 with the support of the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism and led by Professor Vasıf Şahoğlu, who in statements reported by Turkish media stressed that the archaeological work carried out between 2009 and 2019 unearthed evidence of what was one of the largest natural disasters in prehistory.
Şahoğlu noted that between 2012 and 2013, volcanic ash debris and evidence of a tsunami were found at the site, with a buried skeleton as a result of the tsunami discovered in 2017. Scientific conclusions about these interesting findings were published in 2022 in the journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) of the USA.
‘One of the largest and most destructive tsunamis in history’
‘The Santorini eruption (about 3,500 years ago) is perhaps the only natural event in human history whose traces can be followed. Its impact was enormous, given that the eruption occurred in one of the most densely populated regions of the Mediterranean basin. It was a disaster that took place at the height of Minoan maritime power,’ Şahoğlu stressed.
‘When the Santorini volcano erupted, ashes that rose into the atmosphere (and then precipitated) was detected in a layer located in the Çeşme-Bağlararası deposit. The same ash layer was also found in an excavation in Egypt, providing a unique marker that allows us to look directly at the same instant in history,’ explained the professor, who stressed however that Bağlararası is the only place where both remains of the volcanic ash layer and the tsunami caused by the great eruption of the Santorini volcano – which occurred around 1,627 BC and is called by historians the “Minoan eruption” because it caused the destruction of this civilisation – have been found.
‘The tsunami deposits found at Bağlararası represent the first archaeological site where evidence of the tsunamis unleashed by the eruption of the Santorini volcano has been identified. Although volcanic ash had previously been found in geological samples, no tsunami remains had ever been found in an archaeological settlement before. It was an event that probably resulted in the loss of thousands of lives in towns along the Aegean coast; and despite being 227 km from Santorini, the tsunamis completely destroyed the settlement at Çeşme-Bağlararası, rendering it uninhabitable,’ said the expert.
‘When we think of tsunamis today, most of us think of Japan or Indonesia; but one of the largest and most destructive tsunamis in history occurred in the heart of the Aegean, on the island of Santorini, following the eruption of its volcano,’ he concluded.
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As a history lover, Pablo Gómez was captivated by Turkey from the first day he visited it in 2006: he got married there, has a house there… and has since become an expert on Turkey’s current affairs. With a long experience in media, he has been at the helm of hispanatolia.com since 2011.
